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Ed Webb

A Compass That Can Clash With Modern Life - New York Times - 0 views

eduwebb.pbwiki.com/Fatwas.htm

fatwa Islam egypt NYT MENA

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Apr 09 - No Cached
  • 'We were very angered when we heard about the Danish cartoons concerning our prophet; however, these two fatwas are harming our Islamic religion and our prophet more than the cartoons,''
  • The complaint has been the subject of recent conferences as government-appointed arbiters of Islamic standards say the fatwa free-for-all has led to the promotion of extremism and intolerance. The conflict in Egypt served as a difficult reminder of a central challenge facing Islamic communities as they debate the true nature of the faith and how to accommodate modernity. The fatwa is the front line in the theological battle between often opposing worldviews. It is where interpretation meets daily life.
  • In a faith with no central doctrinal authority, there has been an explosion of places offering fatwas, from Web sites that respond to written queries, to satellite television shows that take phone calls, to radical and terrorist organizations that set up their own fatwa committees.
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  • Governments have tried to guide and control the process, but as they struggled with their own legitimacy, they have often undermined the perceived legitimacy of those they appoint as religious leaders.
  • combines the role of social worker, therapist, lawyer and religious adviser.
  • 'We are the conscience of the nation,'' said Abdel Moety Bayoumi, a member of Al Azhar Research Committee, a state-sanctioned body that issues religious opinions and is often behind decisions over which books should be stripped from store shelves and banned. In Egypt, and other Muslim countries, where laws must abide by the Koran, fatwas by government-appointed officials can have the weight of law. ''We have to be clear what is at stake here,'' said Egypt's grand mufti, Sheik Ali Gomaa, in a recent speech in London. ''When each and every person's unqualified opinion is considered a fatwa, we have lost a tool that is of the utmost importance to rein in extremism and preserve the flexibility and balance of Islamic law.''
Ed Webb

A Compass That Can Clash With Modern Life - New York Times - 0 views

query.nytimes.com/...fullpage.html

fatwa Islam egypt NYT

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Apr 09 - Cached
  • For many Muslims, fatwas, or religious edicts, are the bridge between the principles of their faith and modern life. They are supposed to be issued by religious scholars who look to the Koran and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad for guidance. While the more sensational pronouncements grab attention, the bulk of the fatwas involve the routine of daily life. In Egypt alone, thousands are issued every month.
  • government-appointed arbiters of Islamic standards say the fatwa free-for-all has led to the promotion of extremism and intolerance.
  • Technically, the fatwa is nonbinding and recipients are free to look elsewhere for a better ruling. In a faith with no central doctrinal authority, there has been an explosion of places offering fatwas, from Web sites that respond to written queries, to satellite television shows that take phone calls, to radical and terrorist organizations that set up their own fatwa committees. ''There is chaos now,'' Mr. Megawer said. ''The problem created is confusion in thought, confusion about what is right and what is wrong, religiously.''
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  • ''These people in fact are defined as agencies of the government,'' said Muhammad Serag, a professor of Islamic Studies at the American University in Cairo. ''They are not trusted anymore.''
  • combines the role of social worker, therapist, lawyer and religious adviser.
  • Should ancient statues be destroyed or preserved? Should women be allowed to drive, to work, to travel without the permission of men? Can boys and girls attend school together? Is it permissible to buy insurance, to wear a sports jersey with a cross design, to shake hands with a non-Muslim, to take pictures, to view family photographs? All of this has been addressed in fatwas.
  • ''When each and every person's unqualified opinion is considered a fatwa, we have lost a tool that is of the utmost importance to rein in extremism and preserve the flexibility and balance of Islamic law.''
Ed Webb

Muslim scholars decry 'fatwa chaos' - International Herald Tribune - 0 views

www.iht.com/...letter.php

fatwa religion internet satellite TV

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Around the world, an explosion in the number of fatwas - pronouncements by religious leaders intended to shape the actions of the faithful on everything from sex to politics - is driving efforts by prominent Muslims to rein in the practice. That's proving a nearly impossible task, given Islam's decentralized nature and the growing number of outlets for the edicts.
  • Muslims in Egypt seeking religious guidance may now turn to satellite television and the Internet for opinions from as far afield as Indonesia - unless they follow the fatwa issued in 2004 by the Dar ul-Ulum, India's largest Islamic seminary, that ruled Muslims shouldn't watch TV. With no pope or patriarch to arbitrate orthodoxy, "it's the nature of Islamic thought to have many options," says Abdel Moti Bayoumi, who heads the Islamic Research Compilation Center in Cairo. "But there are too many unqualified opinions being spread, and this is wrong." The result is what MENA, Egypt's official news agency, calls "fatwa chaos."
  • Mainstream Islamic scholars blame TV and the Web for the proliferation of pronouncements,
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  • On Sept. 28, Al-Azhar University, which is affiliated with the mosque, announced it was setting up its own TV station to issue proper edicts and avoid "fatwa chaos," according to MENA. A week later, the Council of Senior Muslim Clerics in Saudi Arabia said it was creating a Web site to provide quick access to its rulings.
  • Adding to the tension is a rivalry between establishment clerics and a new breed of television preachers, says Amr Khaled, a former accountant turned "tele-imam" who eschews the customary robes of Muslim imams for a coat and tie. His show, "Paradise in Our House," appears on four Middle East satellite stations, and Time magazine picked him as one of its 100 most influential people for 2007.
Ed Webb

Egypt's Ministry of Religious Endowments boosts its imams' media skills - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...ing-media-skills-of-imams.html

Egypt Islam religion politics awqaf Al-Azhar azhar sermons fatwas media rhetoric training

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Will a one-week training enable Egypt’s imams to sound more reassuring, more emphatic and appear more camera-friendly on television? The Ministry of Religious Endowments certainly hopes so.
  • Courses include teaching the imams how to speak in talk shows, telephone interviews and TV debates. It also teaches them body language for interviews on TV as well as writing sound bites for various types of televised interviews. 
  • the course aims to develop the media skills of the imams so that they can “dominate the religious discourse,” counter extremist views expressed by the Salafists and efficiently debunk false interpretations on religion in TV programs.
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  • In 2017, the parliamentary Committee on Religious Affairs approved a draft law that banned issuing fatwas through the media unless prior authorization had been obtained from Al-Azhar, the country’s top religious institution. The draft still has to go through the General Assembly to become law.
  • The Ministry of Religious Endowments — known locally as Awqaf — objected that the right of authorizations should rest with Al-Azhar, saying that this bypasses the ministry, which should be the appropriate authority to grant permissions. The ministry argued that as all of its imams are graduates of Al-Azhar, they were fully equipped to give this permission.
  • Parliament has shelved the draft law until an agreement is reached between Al-Azhar and Awqaf, which has so far failed to materialize. 
  • According to Hosni Hassan, media professor at Helwan University, the main purpose of the trainings is to ensure that the Friday sermons — delivered by imams of Awqaf — are efficient tools to spread the Egyptian state’s version of Islam and to persuade the public.
  • The state — represented by the Ministry of Religious Endowments — is paying close attention to Friday sermons and religious lessons in mosques so they can become tools of improving social and religious behavior
  • “The rate of extremist fatwas has declined since 2013 after the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood, after the group was designated as a terrorist organization and its sheikhs were arrested,”
  • The ministry announced in 2014 that only preachers licensed by the ministry were allowed to deliver the Friday sermons or teach religious classes in mosques.The ministry organizes a number of exams every year for those wishing to obtain such licenses. In 2015, a new law stipulated that unlicensed preachers who deliver the Friday sermons or teach religious courses in mosques shall be sentenced to imprisonment from three months to a year or pay a fine of 20,000-50,000 pounds ($1,238-3,097).
  • The Ministry of Religious Endowments also issued in 2016 a decision that the imams in the mosques deliver a unified Friday sermon.
Ed Webb

Al-Azhar sheikh says protesting forbidden in Islam - Bikya Masr - 0 views

bikyamasr.com/wordpress

fatwas Islam Egypt #jan25 media religion protests

shared by Ed Webb on 31 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Al-Azhar is the most influential Islamic institution in the country, however, in recent years it has become more in line with the government and most Egyptians have ignored fatwas that have been released
Ed Webb

by : Yahoo! Tech - 0 views

tech.yahoo.com/...as_indonesia_islam_facebook

Indonesia fatwas facebook

shared by Ed Webb on 22 May 09 - Cached
  • SURABAYA, Indonesia - Muslim clerics debating the exploding popularity of Facebook in Indonesia said Friday that followers could use the networking site to connect with friends or for work — but not to gossip or flirt.
  • Around 700 clerics, or imams, agreed to draft up guidelines on surfing the Web after receiving complaints about Facebook and other sites, including concerns they encourage illicit sex
  • It has become easier today for the young to connect, the imams' 300-word edict said, "erasing space and time constraints" and making it possible for couples to get to know — before they get married — if they really are well-suited.
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  • Though an edict by the clerics does not carry any legal weight, it could be endorsed by the influential Ulema Council, which recently issued rulings against smoking and yoga. Some devout Muslims adhere to the council's rulings because ignoring a fatwa, or religious decree, is considered a sin.
Ed Webb

BBC News - Morocco: Should pre-marital sex be legal? - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-africa-19049000

Morocco media television TV sex law sharia

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • The editor of Morocco's Al-Ahdath Al-Maghribia daily newspaper, Moktar el-Ghzioui, is living in fear for his life after he expressed support for pre-marital sex during a local television debate. "The next thing there was a cleric from Oujda releasing a fatwa that I should die," he says.
  • Imam Hassan Ait Belaid who preaches at a mosque in the commercial capital Casablanca says article 490 is part of the culture of a non-Western society. "If the code is removed, we will become wild savages. Our society will become a disaster," he says.
  • Critics of the Islamists argue that the strict sex laws merely increase the harassment of women.
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  • that the issue is for the first time a hot topic of debate shows that long held taboos are slowly being broken
Ed Webb

Hollywood blockbuster "Noah" faces ban in Arab World - News - Aswat Masriya - 0 views

en.aswatmasriya.com/...view.aspx

film censorship religion MENA

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Three Arab countries have banned the Hollywood film "Noah" on religious grounds even before its worldwide premiere and several others are expected to follow suit
  • Islam frowns upon representing holy figures in art and depictions of the Prophet Mohammad in European and North American media have repeatedly sparked deadly protests in Islamic countries over the last decade, fanning cultural tensions with the West. "Censors for Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE (United Arab Emirates) officially confirmed this week that the film will not release in their countries," a representative of Paramount Pictures, which produced the $125 million film starring Oscar-winners Russell Crowe and Anthony Hopkins, told Reuters
  • the studio expected a similar ban in Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait
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  • Noah, who in the Bible's Book of Genesis built the ark that saved his family and many pairs of animals from a great flood, is revered by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. An entire chapter in the Koran is devoted to him.
  • Cairo's Al-Azhar, the highest authority of Sunni Islam and a main centre of Islamic teaching for over a millennium, issued a fatwa, or religious injunction, against the film on Thursday. "Al-Azhar ... renews its objection to any act depicting the messengers and prophets of God and the companions of the Prophet (Mohammad), peace be upon him,"
  • Mel Gibson's 2004 film "The Passion of the Christ" on Jesus's crucifixion was widely screened in the Arab World, despite a flurry of objections by Muslim clerics. A 2012 Arab miniseries "Omar" on the exploits of a seventh century Muslim ruler and companion of the Prophet Mohammad also managed to defy clerics' objections and air on a Gulf-based satellite television channel.
Ed Webb

Brian Whitaker's blog, October 2010 - 0 views

www.al-bab.com/...blog1010a.htm

fatwas internet online KSA Islam wahhabism

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • The Associated Press has been looking in some detail at the likely effects of the royal decree. While some Saudis view it as pointing the way to a modernisation of religious teaching, others see it merely as an attempt to assert state control. The AP report points out that the officially-approved clerics – Council of Senior Religious Scholars – are far from progressive and many of them can be considered hardliners. "Beyond strict edicts on morality, they reinforce a worldview whereby non-Muslims and even liberal or Shiite Muslims are considered infidels, and their stances on jihad, or holy war, at times differ only in nuances from al-Qaeda's," it says.
Ed Webb

The Associated Press: Saudi king shakes up religious establishment - 0 views

www.google.com/...CPOZA7URuMxoW4x9M4nWAD96BI7SO2

KSA politics reform education religion

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Feb 09 - No Cached
  • The Saudi king on Saturday dismissed the chief of the religious police and a cleric who condoned killing the owners of TV networks that broadcast "immoral" content, signaling an effort to weaken the country's hard-line Sunni establishment.
  • The king also changed the makeup of an influential body of religious scholars, for the first time giving more moderate Sunnis representation to the group whose duties include issuing the religious edicts known as fatwas.
  • Abdullah's changes indicate that he has built the necessary support and consensus in the religious elite and in the ruling family.
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  • Grand Ulama Commission. Its 21 members will now represent all branches of Sunni Islam, instead of the single strict Hanbali sect that has always governed it.
  • "We will seek to achieve the aspirations of the rulers."
  • ensuring that no one marks the banned holiday
  • Abdullah has said that reforming the judiciary, a bastion of hard-line clerics implementing Islamic law, is one of his top priorities
  • The king appointed Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, his son-in-law, as education minister.
  • Noura al-Fayez has been appointed Faisal's deputy for girls' education — the first time a woman has been appointed a deputy minister.
Ed Webb

...: T.C. DİYANET İŞLERİ BAŞKANLIĞI :... - 0 views

www.diyanet.gov.tr/...default.asp

Turkey Islam fatwa government politics DIR

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The Structure, Mission and Social Function of the Presidency of Religious Affairs
Ed Webb

The Salman Rushdie affair: Thirty years and a novelist later | Iran | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...-novelist-190217140017088.html

Iran UK Britain India Muslims Islam novels book books censorship

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Feb 19 - Cached
  • Thirty years ago, on Valentine's Day, February 14, 1989, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, then the supreme leader of Iran, issued a religious decree, a fatwa, condemning the British Indian novelist Salman Rushdie to death.
  • What had triggered the Ayatollah's ire, and indeed the fury of many other Muslims, particularly in Pakistan, was Rushdie's novel called Satanic Verses which had just come out. The book was written and published in English. The ayatollah did not read English. He was reacting to the reaction of others who had not read the novel either. It was all a comedy of terrors.
  • in February 1989, the Iranian supreme leader was very much preoccupied with guaranteeing the continuation of the Islamic Republic he had established. He needed to order a redrafting of the constitution in a way to allow his devoted follower Ali Khamenei (the current supreme leader of Iran), who had nowhere near the qualifications of Montazeri, to succeed him. He needed yet another smokescreen, just like the American Hostage Crisis of 1979-1981, which had allowed him to consolidate power by wiping out his political rivals. Rushdie's Satanic Verses showed up at an opportune time. It had come out of nowhere and the ayatollah would take it somewhere else.
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  • certain passages in the novel some Muslims had found blasphemous
  • In many significant ways, the "Salman Rushdie Affair" marked the start of the rise of Islamophobia in the US and Europe, affecting millions of Muslim communities and particularly, the refugees forced to flee their homelands. Rushdie himself became a key culprit in fomenting that hatred against Islam and Muslims. As Ayatollah Khomeini led the militant Muslim fanatics, Rushdie did the same with Islamophobe liberal imperialists like Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, with Muslim communities inadvertently getting caught in between.
  • Satanic Verses was the first casualty of the Salman Rushdie affair and the last novel that Salman Rushdie would write - no matter how many more he published. After February 1989, it ceased to be read on its own merits or maladies. It became an allegory, an icon, a dead certainty - non-Muslims used it to explain or to camouflage their anti-Muslim hatred, and Muslims - to denounce "the West" and its plots against the Muslim world.
Ed Webb

Why Iran's grand ayatollahs are fighting over Rumi - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...yatollahs-fight-over-rumi.html

Iran Turkey movies movie Rumi Mysticism

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Plans to make a movie about Rumi, a 13th-century Persian Sufi poet, have once again revived an old quarrel between two currents among Iranian clerics — one that celebrates him as a great mystic and another that opposes his teachings as deviation and heresy.
  • nearly 750 years after Rumi's death, award-winning Iranian director Hassan Fathi, known in Iran for the hit series “Shahrzad,” announced Sept. 22 that he would produce a movie titled “Drunk on Love” about the much-speculated relationship between Rumi and Shams.
  • The project is to be an Iranian-Turkish production.
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  • two powerful ayatollahs in Iran would like to see the project nipped in the bud, saying Sufism is a deviation from Shiite Islam and any attempt to promote or spread it with a movie would be "haram"
  • Part of the opposition to the film is based on the fact that it is a co-production with Turkey. A group of experts and journalists stated their opposition to the Rumi and Shams movie owing to the presence of a Turkish producer behind the film, implying that the two countries — both of which claim the heritage of Rumi — have different interpretations on the life and works of the mystic poet.
  • Members of the hadith current have issued fatwas against mystics repeatedly. For example, a summit in Qom in 2007 declared Rumi a heretic.
  • The country’s culture minister, Abbas Salehi, a cleric who doesn’t wear a turban, told reporters after the Sept. 25 Cabinet meeting that while the opinions of marjas — the highest Shiite authorities — should be respected, “the country has its own laws.” This was taken to mean that the making of the film would not be prohibited because of the objections. So far, there are no indications that the movie is being obstructed by Tehran.
  • “Drunk on Love” is not the only controversy in Iran over films that deal with religious figures. In September, member of parliament Ali Motahari called on authorities to permit the movie “Hussein Who Said No” to be screened in cinema and theaters across the country. The movie, which has been banned for seven years, narrates the story of battle of Karbala in the year 680, where the third imam of the Shiites, Hussein ibn Ali, and 72 male companions were killed by Caliph Yazid ibn Muawiya’s army. “The main obstacle [in the way] of receiving the screening permit has been the portrayal of the face of ‘Abbas’ that I believe has no religious problem,” Motahari wrote on his Instagram page Sept. 23. Motahari said Abbas ibn Ali — the half-brother of Hussein — is not one of the sacred Shiite imams, which means the portrayal of his face should not be prohibited.
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